The little swallow, brightly dressed,
Comes every spring to visit us.
I ask the swallow: ‘Why do you come here?’
She replies: ‘Spring is the most beautiful here!’
Little swallow, let me tell you,
This year things here are prettier still,
We’ve built large factories,
With new machines.
Welcome,
And please stay for a long time.
‘Little Swallow’, Chinese children’s song, 1953
The sun shines as Prometheus makes its stately progress up the great Yangtze River. Flat countryside on either side. Hills in the distance. Mountains beyond.
The coppery brown of the eternal river. Slipping, sliding on either side of us. The pale feathery green of bamboo groves beside white farm compounds and the flat jade green of rice fields and the glossy dark green of camphor and pomelo trees.
Men fishing from boats with tame cormorants. The cormorants perch all round the gunwales of the boat, squawking and flapping their wings. They have short strings attached to their legs and rings round their necks so they cannot swallow their prey. A kite tries to rob a cormorant of its catch, dancing and sliding in the air above it.
In some places whole banks are strewn with pink and white autumn flowers and the breeze off them comes fresh and scented across our decks. A red line of hills grow more prominent as they approach us, with red orange patches of early autumn leaves and the dark green of camphor on their slopes, the lighter green of tea groves and bamboos, red soil and whitish rocks. The hills break upon the river in cliffs. Red cliffs.
Here, commanded by the great Zhuge Liang himself, Liu Bei’s army defeated the forces of the evil Cao Cao – bent on conquering all China – at the mighty Battle of Red Cliffs. As we pass the passengers cheer and applaud. I, rather pathetically, cry.
My children are alive. My wife is alive. My mother has died. A sloping line of wild geese fly by.
As we sail, in parallel to us, on either bank, run roads and trackways along which travel patient lines of refugees, soldiers, civilians, farmers – all trekking steadily west. Lorries, buses, camels, cars, yaks, peasants driving livestock, carts piled high with belongings or farm implements, large groups of children, whole schools marching west, many singing songs. Coolies bearing equipment and parts of machinery and babies and old ladies and fat uncles in bathchairs or slung from poles or on their backs. The tracks and roads they travel on weave back and forth, so sometimes they are close to us and wave, sometimes they are far away and disappear. But there are regular food and fodder stations, where they can stop and rest. A whole nation on the trek.
On board there’s just as much variety. Farmers with stock. Missionaries with Bibles. Farmers’ wives with chickens and geese and ducks. In the saloon, with velvet upholstery and on glossy teak tabletops, twenty-four-hour gambling and chatter in a haze of cigarette and opium smoke, children squirming under the tables and women squatting on the floor breastfeeding, arguing, knitting, screaming at their children. A universal clack-magg!
On deck people parade. Or rather squeeze between each other. A university professor holds a seminar among his youthful students, all jammed together. A young couple in love conveniently crushed up against each other. Lots of people fast asleep on the deck. An anti-aircraft gun lonely on its platform with no one to man it. Someone has hung their washing over its barrel. The officer and seamen on the bridge ignore all we mere mortals. And up in the bows a flock of young, blind orphans chatter and bubble among themselves. They’ve been put in the bows because the blind love to smell things, and the beautiful scents and perfumes of the countryside we’re passing through can best be savoured unsoiled by the smoke from the funnel and the stink of tobacco. A rather stern-looking woman with glasses commands them.
We sail on. Out into the flat countryside once more. On both banks are paddy fields, where the year’s last crop of rice has a silver frosty bloom to its tips. Patchwork grass meadows rippling in the breeze like greensilver pools.
At night, beneath the heavens, we look down on the dots of light which dance upon the river – fishing sampans, shrimp trappers, passing steamships and junks. I lie on my back and look up into the depths of the Milky Way. A great estuary of light spread across heaven.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
*
The next morning we steadily approach a line of mountains, its peaks like an army on the march. The Yangtze flows down, fast, impetuously amid these mountains. We must sail up through these fast, fierce waters before we can pass out on the other side into the broad fertile plains of South-West China.
We are approaching the famous, fearsome Three Gorges.
On either side the travellers on foot and on the road who have accompanied us thus far from Wuhan peel away to follow their own vertiginous routes through the mountains to Sichuan. On either side of the river – now narrower and much more fast-flowing – where freighters can unload their really heavy cargoes of machinery and steel, which will be hiked and hauled up through the passes by chained-together tractors, teams of horses, or long long lines of coolies. Junks also stop at these quays and unload their passengers, who will have to walk up through the mountains. Junks with just sails cannot make it through the gorges.
But our steamer will steam up through the great gorges. Prometheus is tough. Prometheus was built on the Tyne by boat builders Palmers of Jarrow. But even it has to pause at a quay while we load more coal and attach giant six-inch rice straw ropes around our bows while 300 coolies set off ahead of us up a track.
At the start of our voyage they do not have to take any weight because our boilers are at full cry, the smoke and steam roaring out, and we make progress against the flood.
But then we enter the gorge, the first gorge, and the coolies start to chant ‘Hey Yah, Hai-yah’ and take the weight, swinging into their work, swaying as one from foot to foot, drawing us forwards inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, up into the high gorges.
Rolling waves sweep down the gorge which towers above us like a whale’s jaws hugely opening – stone cliffs for lips, mountain after mountain high above like layers of serrated teeth, as around us, through its throat, roars the river’s rage, spouting spray, gulping with hunger at our frail craft, making small ships and skiffs travelling down spin and skip and drop like feathers over rapids amid the surf and turmoil.
In case you are concerned, we make it through the first gorge.
Where the rock is hard-wearing limestone, the water has taken time to eat through it and the river is narrow and crowded by cliffs. These are the gorges. Where the rock is softer sandstone, the banks are more eaten away and the river has space to flow more gracefully.
In the comparative calm of the waters between the first and second gorges we make some headway and the coolies can rest as we slowly progress, but then we arrive at the second limestone gorge.
The coolies chant ahead of us. Our boiler incenses, fit to explode. Its pistons race and squeal.
The great cliffs are sheer on either side and smooth, as if they have been hewn and polished. The coolies toil upon a walkway chiselled into the rock. This dark dismal gorge is so narrow and the cliffs towering above it so close and high that the sun can only be glimpsed shining down for a few minutes at midday, and the moon will merely be glimpsed in all her godly serenity for a few seconds at midnight.
We toil amid the gloom.
Because limestone rocks often contain deep vertical fissures, over centuries the water has fingered its way deep down, slowly undercutting the precipitous cliffs above so that suddenly, without any warning, whole cliffsides can collapse and guillotine down into the water and liquidate all beneath. Ships, armies, emperors are known to have been annihilated beneath these monsters.
We tiptoe between them, cautious as mice. Finally we emerge into sunlight.
We moor to a quay and for half an hour we can walk and inspect some shops and market stalls. Most of us pray at an altar for a safe journey through the final gorge, the famous, infamous Qutang Gorge.
The view ahead of us is spectacular. A giant row of peaks stampede towards us like charging bulls, culminating in a mighty mountain which towers over us tiny frail mortals as we toil up through the gorge.
A new team of coolies are harnessed up for this final journey. We start. ‘Hey Yah, Hai-yah.’ Start up through the hungry waters.
We enter a very different sort of gorge. Silent, mysterious, almost magical.
As previously there are cliffs on either side, but these are lower, breaking off into great slopes covered in pine and vegetation. And above them, in their balconies, the great mountains – row upon row upon row of serrated peaks stretching into infinity.
We pass beneath cliffs where ancient runes and letterings have been engraved in the rocks. How did the Ancients manage, perched precarious and clinging to the cliff faces just above the merciless waters, to carve out their archaic characters? Most of these poems and runes have been washed away by time but a few are still legible. It is said they were carved by the great sage Zhuge Liang himself, welcoming travellers to the Kingdom of Shu Han.
Above us these great banks and cleavages of forest, rank after rank of serried pine trees, the mists moving slowly, mysteriously through their boughs. The towers and buttresses of rock like stately castles and fortresses. Sweeping upward and upward, vegetation spilling wildly from every available ledge however small. And above them mountain and sky.
It is so silent, so solemn. Like some giant European cathedral. Except for one sound. Apes live among these forests and cliffs. Their mournful, haunting cries and shrieks ring across its vast emptiness from bank to bank, over our heads. Holding us in thrall.
I look down into the waters. The violent turbid yellow snatching at us. Bounding and bouncing over rocks and boulders. And then suddenly, from the water’s depths – leaping like salmon in spate, lambs in a spring meadow, calves in a spring orchard – dance, arc, dive, leap a steadfast line of Baiji, white-finned Yangtze dolphins – powerful, indefatigable, unyielding to the flood – shepherding, guiding, guarding us from all harm and all evil.
And they are gone. Our little guardians. And we are out into the wide waters of the upper Yangtze.23
*
At the top of the Three Gorges, on a bank, is conveniently situated the great and ancient Zhang Fei Temple. Convenient because all those who have just travelled up through the Three Gorges will, shaken and terrified, want to immediately thank all their various gods and goddesses for having spared their lives, while all those about to descend on their hair-raising, helter-skelter ride will, full of doom and despair, likewise want to demand their gods and goddesses protect them from all harm and disaster. So all in all Zhang Fei’s ancient temple does a roaring trade.
Zhang Fei was the faithful lieutenant of Liu Bei (who is buried only a few miles away), the heroic first king of the Kingdom of Shu Han. Zhang Fei was his greatest warrior, Zhuge Liang his great counsellor and strategist. We are entering this lofty kingdom.
Within the temple is a huge and ancient statue of Zhang Fei, and a pavilion in honour of my favourite poet Du Fu, who sheltered here peacefully for three years in his war-torn, dislocated times.
I go to one of the altars, burn incense, say my prayers. As a Christian, a socialist, and a recent flirter with the ideas of Confucius, my prayers are general rather than particular, and spoken to all and every deity who will listen. I pray especially to the spirits of Zhang Fei, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang to protect our country in the years ahead.
I thank the Lord Jesus for having spared my family. I pray I am swiftly reunited with them. I pray for the soul and spirit of my dearest mother and that she is now, buried amid her ancestors, fully accepted into their ranks and is a garland and joy to their community.
It is at this point that I become aware of the blind orphans who are travelling in the bow of our ship. In a line, hands on the shoulders of the child ahead of them, they pass me by and then stop. I look down at them. First I see the officious and quite short lady with large glasses who is matter-of-factly in charge of them as they wind through the temple. She tells them of the wonderful statues of all the heroes and gods they are surrounded by. They are all savouring the smell of incense.
I suddenly recognize the woman. She is quite famous. Her name is Shi Liang. A lawyer known for her ferocity in court. I saw her at the opening meeting of our elected parliament when she had a lot to say about the rights of women – which I am greatly in favour of – and even more about the rights and well-being of children.
I wonder about whether to introduce myself to her but decide not to. She is ordering one child to stop picking his nose. But then, quite by chance, my glance falls upon the face of one particular child. I stand poleaxed. The child is smiling. Well, smiling as much as a child with her face cut half away and her eyes gouged out can smile.
It is the girl defaced, cut about, set to begging by the criminals on the Bund. Who Tian Boqi acted so bravely to defend. I continue to stare at the blinded child as she passes me by. This earns me a glare from Shi Liang. But before the child has passed me completely I hear her tell her companion that she loves blue parasols. She loves blue parasols.
On the way out of the temple there are some stalls selling tat to tourists. One of them sells cheap paper parasols – including blue ones. I buy one.
We rejoin our steamer and set off once more up the calm waters of the Yangtze towards Chungking.
I stand on the upper deck with the folded paper parasol beneath my arm looking down on the clustered blind orphans in the bow. She is chattering with animation in her twisted, devastated face. Blithely chattering away to her friends and comrades who she has never seen. Who have never seen her.
I walk down the steps and approach the stern Shi Liang.
‘Excuse me,’ I say.
‘Yes?’ she barks at me.
After the way I stared in the temple she’s obviously already got me marked as a wrong ’un.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘my name is Lao She. I’m a novelist.’
‘Don’t read novels. Haven’t got time.’
‘The thing is, that girl with the horribly gouged face, I recognize her, from when she was on the Bund, back in Wuhan, being forced by those terrible criminals to beg.’
‘And…?’
‘Well, I overheard her back at the temple saying that she really loved parasols, blue parasols, so I thought I would buy her one so she could have it, play with it.’
‘We get men like you coming up all the time, saying you just want to help these poor, defenceless children. You feel so sorry for them. Could you just meet them? And when you get hold of them you do all sorts of horrific, appalling things to them. You know the scum who held her on the Bund used to farm her out, at extreme prices, to people who wanted to do the sort of thing you want to do to her.’
‘I do not in any way want to harm that poor child. Please let me explain.’
She grunts.
‘I have children.’
I stop for a second. Carry on.
‘When I used to see her on the Bund I did not know whether my own family, my own children, were alive or dead. We had become – separated. And I used to look at her because – because I feared, I feared that she might be one of my children…’
‘Have you found out since whether your family is still alive?’
‘I have. Thank God, they are still alive. But the whole ugliness, the whole shame I felt for abandoning my children, my family, was reflected in her poor, defenceless face. I want to give her something that she says she wants because it will make her happy.’
‘I have heard her go on about blue parasols too,’ says Shi Liang.
She looks at me without affection.
‘You can take her the parasol. Talk to her for a while. But if I see anything, the slightest suggestion of malfeasance, I’ll have the captain take you out and shoot you. And I have the powers to do that.’
I don’t doubt her. She is a very senior lawyer with many high connections in the government. And good for her for not taking a plane to Chungking and staying behind in person to guard these tiny children.
Somewhat gingerly I step forwards, step between the children, make my way up to the little girl, sit down beside her.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Who are you?’ asks the little girl.
‘I am Lao,’ I say. ‘What is your name?’
‘I do not know,’ she says.
‘When you went to see that temple back there,’ I said, ‘you and all your friends walked past me, and I heard you say you liked blue parasols.’
‘I love blue parasols,’ she said. ‘My sister Cherry Blossom once had one. She looked so pretty twirling it around that I have always wanted one. Once she let me hold it.’
‘Where is your sister Cherry Blossom?’ I ask.
‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘We were going on this long walk. But then my father, who was a very evil man, would not let me walk with them anymore. He was very nasty with his spade. And he drove me away from my family and I was lost and had no food or water and I was crying and then I fell down and I could not walk anymore and I was very scared and then started to fall asleep I was so tired but then suddenly these kind men found me and took me up and gave me food and water and then they asked what had happened to me and I told them about my father and his spade and they said he was a very evil man and then they said they were very poor and had no money and no food to eat or water to drink that they could give me but I could help them to get that so that we could all eat and all drink and they said it would hurt a lot but that I was a brave and kind little girl, which I am, and they said could they do it and because they were good people, unlike my evil father, I said yes, and it did hurt a lot, a whole lot, and I could not see anymore, but they were still kind to me and fed me even though they beat me sometimes because I was a bad girl and did not cry out enough and I was a good girl and I always tried to cry out a lot and I was happy, even though they beat me sometimes, but then these rough men came up and beat my kind friends and drove them away and they took me and I was very sad and crying but they brought me to this place where there were lots of other children like me who could not see and then we started to know each other and talk to each other and feel and smell each other and tell each other stories – which is very nice – and now I have lots of friends and sing songs and hold everyone’s hands and dance dances and then we got on this boat and we are going to a very happy place and we will always be together and never depart from each other and that will be very nice.’
She finishes.
‘But why do you want a parasol?’ I ask.
‘Because my sister Cherry Blossom had one and I miss her.’
‘Here,’ I say, ‘this is a blue parasol for you.’ I hand it to her.
She holds it. Feels it.
‘Is this a blue parasol?’ she asks, wonderingly.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘this is a blue parasol.’
She looks straight into my face. And somehow or other I do not see the scars. All I see is the beauty and the wonder in her face.
‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you.’
‘Shall I open it for you?’ I ask.
‘Please,’ she says, ‘yes!’
I take it back and carefully open it. It’s one of those parasols with tiny fluted vents in each segment, so that when you twirl it it make a sweet hum.
‘Here you are,’ I say, handing it carefully to her.
‘Oh,’ she says, holding it before her. She gives it a slight twirl and it gives a low hum.
‘Oh,’ she cries. ‘It’s one that sings. I really wanted one that sings. Look, Huiliang,’ she cries to the boy beside her, ‘I’ve got a parasol. A blue parasol.’
Of course he can’t look, but that’s not the point.
I make my way back to the unsmiling Shi Liang and thank her.
She grunts.
‘What will happen to them when they get to Chungking?’
‘We will keep them together. That is vital. Because they know and understand each other. They do not know what it is like to see so it does not bother them. A special school is being built for them, where they will be taught how to do things through feel. Practical things mainly. And when they are older they will be sent to a factory for the blind. All together still. Where they can work on simple tasks like folding cardboard boxes, making simple clothes, winding rope. So they can be useful. Like all of us.’
She turns away from me and resumes her gimlet watch upon her flock. Our conversation is obviously over.
What a formidable woman! How admirable! A mother hen looking out for her chicks. If she ever stands for election I will definitely vote for her.
I walk away. Stop. Suddenly I realize that the little nameless girl’s gouged face and blinded eyes do not matter anymore. She is among, she will always be, among people that cannot see her. Do not care about what she looks like, because they do not know what looks are. They will judge her, value her, by the beauty in her voice, the smell of her body, her soul. She will not be weighed down like the rest of us, stuck in the deadweight of our flesh and its looks. She will fly.
I walk up the steps again to the top deck. Look forwards. To the sun setting fire to the west as it sets. To the beauty of the plains and woods we sail amid. To the hopes I have of reuniting with my family again. And especially I look at the little girl, sitting in the bow, parasol hoisted aloft, twirling proudly round and round, all a-chatter with her friends.
Blessings to you, Lord Jesus.